(Real) Stargate Built In Backyard

PVC, wood, and some creativity bring this Stargate duplicate to life. [Mango] and his father started with AutoCad drawings taped together, and ended with the Stargate you see before you. Sure it’s not 22 foot in diameter and not made of Naquadah, but its inner ring rotates and dials like the real thing and it has all 39 symbols – hand carved. Catch a fun and entertaining video with the Stargate after the break.

[via SciFiWire]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y50rdtZbGE%5D

56 thoughts on “(Real) Stargate Built In Backyard

  1. Well it won’t dial all 9 chevrons here because Earth doesn’t have a Naquadah core. And given what happened to the two planets where the ninth chevron was dialed, we probably wouldn’t want to try it either.

  2. @Nag

    Make that a ’90s sub-par movie that went on to inspire a total of THREE (so far) television series, one lasting 11 (read: eleven) seasons, IIRC.

    And how does a pedal powered, gold-foil Lame-Mobile qualify as less lame than this? o.O

  3. @nag
    In his defense….you’re on the internet bitching about his “sub par movie prop” whilst people are starving to death. But hey good to see you’re doing something constructive instead.

    I actually liked the stargate tv series.

  4. I don’t think a ZPM could dial it. It took a “whole” planet of Naquadria, not Naquadah, to dial it.
    They’d have to have a huge number of ZPMs. And since they destroyed the Replicators, no replicating. They do have the Asgard thing though, scan and replicate?

    Anyway, that was pretty awesome. Not so much a hack though. Unless you mean hacking our perceptions through camera trickery… that could count.

  5. @ nag
    Yes, because if people are suffering, we must all live in abject, humorless misery.

    Wait, no, fuck that. You know, I paid way to much for some fast food today, and threw some away because it was too much. I estimate that some 285 children died of hunger while I was consuming that over-caloric meal, which will require me to waste energy at sports to prevent me from becoming fat.

    I can’t solve that problem. And that means I take advantage of my privileged position as an inhabitant of a civilized country, and enjoy myself. Whether that is eating junk food or watching someone else build a miniature movie prop for some After Effects fun.

    Please go fornicate an oxidized spade.

  6. Hackaday is getting pretty lame. Yeah I like stargate and yes the gate is cool. But seriously as the 1st post stated, not a hack. I mean come on “HAD” it is from 2005, let alone not even a hack (yes I said it again). I will continue to go to “HAD” because once in a blue moon they have something worth a real hack.

    So please show more hacks and less crap.

  7. I was a bit disappointed to see that the “V”‘s weren’t moving in the dialling (they did move on tv right?)

    Hack a day is still cool, whatever the crap they post.
    See it this way, if they’d remove/not post all the “not a hack” related articles, they would probably have to rename it to Hack a month and you would have to go find some place else to bitch on arduino.

    It is on behalf of all those that don’t spend their entire day surfing on the interweb but still come to HAD for some “hack” news,
    Thank you writers of hackaday.com

    oh and by the way,
    what’s an oxidized spade?
    fantasy?
    no really what is it?

  8. Definitely cooler than the gold foil pedal car.

    Although, I’d rather have a much smaller version that was powered and actually went through a dialing sequence using a DHD.

  9. well, i don’t know if you can dial 9 chevrons with a bunch of ZPMs, maybe you can, but maybe the stargate needs a current pulse too high for the ZPMs to handle it (we don’t know the internal resistance, but at least the naquadah is a superconductor, so we don’t have loses in the wire), in that case you should use a lot of capacitors in parallel with the modules.
    But we know the stargate has supercapacitors built in, so i don’t know.

  10. well it obviously is a REAL stargate, you should show this to president obama because now the space exploration program can continue, only way more awesome, and less expensive.

  11. The Asgard core couldn’t dial a 9th chevron either, it puts off less juice then a ZPM. But I would imagine the Asgard would have better power generating tech then what the use for there mobile systems. I don’t see why they don’t build there own ZPMs though, they have Atlantis’s data base, the Asgard database, and replicator tech; thats more then enough to build a fleets worth of ZPMs like super quick. (the again they could build a Ancient+Asgard ship fleet in months using replicators if they would just man up and program them correctly. I am just glad to see we all finally have access to our own personal gate networks, even if it is a small gate.

  12. yes, there is a lot of awesome technologies that could have been used in a better way.

    i don’t know if the Asgard’s synthesizing technology can replicate a ZPM, it’s not just normal matter. It’s something like an isolated region of subspace from where you can extract vacuum energy or something like that.
    Maybe you can make fuel for a nuclear reactor, or antimatter. (it will consume more energy than what it can deliver, but it will be a good battery)
    and the nanites??, those could have done a lot of good, but they didn’t program them well and they discarded them. very disappointing.

  13. Is it just me or did the grass turn blue when he added water to the center of his stargate? Mabey the stargate is working. I would say he should check the photoshot settings/ I do like how a building project / not a hack was featured on Hack a day or like today 10 hacks a day. Keep up the good work.

  14. Ah, Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

    I love it!

    “For cryin’ out loud, Carter!”

    Now let’s see you build one of those great big honking space guns with … er … magnets?

    You must have had the repository of the Ancients downloaded into your head to know how to build that.

    Seriously, I LOVE IT!

    Who needs the Tollan now?

    When is someone going to build a 302?

    Kudos with much love and respect to you my friend.

    “That’s Colonel O’Neill, with two ‘L’s.”

  15. Someone tried to make a ZPM-ish device, but it drew vacuum energy from parallel dimensions through subspace. Didn’t pan out well, total annihilation kinda thing, tore fabric of space, carter fixed it, or maybe McKay…….nobody can make ZPM’s the knowledge and technology was lost with the ancients. A database can only hold so much info. Just watched something about Stephen Hawking and zero point energy today, on the right track. It took one ZPM to dial the address for Pegasus, maybe if they had 2 spares, they could dial 9 from Atlantis……..maybe.

  16. Too bad they did not go looking for Blender for their CG. There is a stargate connect waterpool model out there that looks great and is easy to edit in that did not look really flat like their copy from the tv show.

    Go all that way to build the prop and not take the last 3 steps to do proper CG.

    Oh well, they are woodworkers not computer experts.

  17. I absolutely love the fact that there’s currently maybe six flames in the comments, and the remainder are all a discussion of the technology of the show. Stargate (just SG-1) is one of my favorite all-time shows.

    I am very impressed with the workmanship of this. For the record (@Icarus) he did plan on making the chevrons move, but scrapped the idea because of the wiring involved. To those of you who are in the “it’s not a hack” crowd, I recommend actually reading the kid’s forum post. The “hack” part of it all is the little things he had to do to compensate for what he didn’t have (no small dinky dong jokes please).

    Still, I’d rather have a gold-foil, Arduino controlled Stargate complete with giant Lego chess pieces guarding the gateroom…

  18. @Nag

    Insulting something that detailed is ignorance on your behalf. If you want to complain, try building a better one first.

    Also the “movie” you are talking about has spawned several more movies, a tv show, and now a new tv show. So I take it it wasn’t sub-par then eh?

  19. Great job, and like carbuncle posted, a great way to spend som family time!

    But me beeing a geek and all love this, but I would never put something like that in my garden, lol. :)

  20. Shouldn’t the parens in the post’s title be double-quotes? I mean, it’s “real” in the sense that it physically exists, but it doesn’t actually generate a wormhole through subspace…

    This is “geeky-cool” and all, but if you’re not going to do it 1:1 scale, you should just make one small enough for your computer desk/night-stand.

    I always thought it would be cool to make a USB one with a “dialing program” that looks like the one on the show. Enter an address and it proceeds to “dial” the mini-gate (with sounds and all). If only I had limitless time and money… *sigh*

  21. OK, nerds. You don’t write “Zed PM”, it’s just ZPM. Zero Point Module. Some cultures pronounce the letter Z as ‘Zed’, instead of ‘Zee’, like the Canadians that make the Stargate TV shows.

  22. @ Steve
    Indeed, the Americans on the show pronounce it Zee Pee Em while the Canadians pronounce it Zed Pee Em, and in the beginning they’d get annoyed when someone said it ‘wrong’. It was, indeed, a bit of an in-joke with all the Canadians working on the show.

  23. Hail to all, most amusing set of comments I have read on Hackaday including at least one mention of Arduino! The kid certainly hacked some wood – okay even if it was in 2005, probably works for Fox now.

  24. Yeah, well, they built it and made it move and light up so it’s almost a “hack” and no, not EVERY stargate has the chevrons that move, and yes, the SG movie was epic and the franchise has done AMAZINGLY well imo, so well that you could almost compare it’s run to that of (gasp) star trek???

  25. I, personally, always thought the Stargate movies and series were pretty lame, but this thing looks pretty freakin’ cool! I do agree that it should have been life-sized, though.

    And LOL at nerds arguing specifics of FICTIONAL technology… Jeez, how bad can you get!!!

  26. if somone made a wooden dalek complete with plunger and a midget inside pedeling around on a tricycle, you would all claim it to be the best hack ever posted
    although it needs more electronics…
    i say good post :P

  27. @everyone

    I can’t believe how lame HAD has become. Probably thanks to you guys who comment “mad props on this awesome hack” yadda yadda.

    1. This ain’t a Hack
    2. If you built this you need a life
    3. If you like this prop you need a life
    4. This IS NOT A HACK of any kind
    5. The oil spill is killing millions of animals, this will not stop it, or even help
    6. Millions of children are dieing while someone selfishly builds this thing to be featured on hack a day. IT’S NOT EVEN A HACK For Almight Jesus’s sake.

  28. @andar_b

    That shitty porsche bicycle is better than this because it actually DOES something. For one, it makes the rider DO SOMETHING, get outside, work out, ride a fucking bicycle. It doesnt use electricity. It’s much better than this bullcrap of a post. I can carve out a star trek communicator thing out of wood and even add a pin on the back so it can hang on my shirt. After i film it i can edit the film with shit-quality CGI to make it look like a real Star Trek next Gen communicator. Now surely I’d expect to be featured on front page hackaday. Oh, and I will expect you lame fans to comment awesome positive posts too.

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